GuildQuality

We’ve recently upgraded GuildQuality’s member directory and member profiles to include an activity stream with each member’s newly published information. We’re calling this the GuildQuality Stream. This enhancement serves two primary purposes:

First, the stream enables visitors to see more information about our members, and help them get a better understand of what you are all about. When your customer report gets updated with more survey feedback, when you add a listing, when you flag a customer comment to be published, when you publish another blog post, when you post something new on twitter — all this content streams into the GuildQuality feed on our home page, as well as your own company specific feed on your profile page.

Second, we’ve added RSS to each of the streams, as well as your customer report. This enables you to grab all of your company’s activity or newly published customer comments and stream them wherever you want. You can auto-tweet your published customer comments, feed your activity into your company intranet, or simply subscribe to it via Google reader or any other RSS reader. The idea is that we’re making it easy for you to stay updated, and even easier to share it with the world.

To get a taste of what all this means, check out GuildQuality’s updated home page and our own member profile.

For a run down of all the specifics, as well as instructions on how to take advantage of it all, read on:

Add your blog to your member profile. If you have a company blog, go to the social media section of your account, and paste your blog’s web address (i.e. http://www.guildquality.com) in the new box entitled “blog”. Once done, every time you publish a new post, it will appear in your company’s stream on your profile page, and in the big GuildQuality stream on our home page.

If your company uses Twitter or Facebook, or has a profile on LinkedIn, Google Local, Yelp, Angie’s List, etc, go ahead and add those links in while you’re here. Including these links in your profile enables visitors to connect to you in additional ways. We can presently funnel activity into your stream from your GQ account, your blog, or your company’s twitter account.

Subscribe to (or share) your RSS feed. If you use a feed reader to aggregate your news (I use Google Reader), you can subscribe to all your company’s latest activities. Click on the RSS symbol in either your company profile (for all activities, including published customer comments) or your Customer Report (for just published comments), copy the link (it will begin with “feed:” rather than “http:”), and add it to your reader. If you get an error, replace “feed:” with “http:” and your reader should accept it.

You can also use these feeds to auto-publish information to your company Twitter account or Facebook fan page. September 1, 2010 Update: We made it even easier to stream your feedback via Twitter or Facebook. Learn about the Facebook integration here and the Twitter integration here. Jumping through the hoops with a service like Twitterfeed or Dlvr.it is no longer necessary. Original text from this post: An obvious use would be to subscribe to the Customer Report feed on your fan page, and auto-post published comments there. Facebook has some built in widgets to facilitate this, and we use Twitterfeed to make this kind of thing happen in Twitter.

To auto-tweet your published customer comments, try this:

1) Create an account with Twitterfeed.

2) Create a “new feed”, and name it something like “GuildQuality Comments.”

3) Copy the RSS feed for your published customer comments (above the comments section of your Customer Report), and paste that address into the “RSS Feed URL” box below the name of your new Twitterfeed.

4) Click on Advanced Settings, and add a post prefix like “From a client:” (this will be what appears in your tweet, prior to the comment). Add a post suffix that includes a shortened link to your Customer Report or Company Profile page (you can use bit.ly or tiny.url to shorten the link).

Of note, you can use the same process to auto-tweet your company’s blog posts, thereby eliminating the need to post in multiple places at once.

Check out our enhanced GQ Home Page. We also made a cosmetic change to our home page: The member map is smaller. By shrinking the map, we created a more logical separation of the customer/company information. Now, all the information to the left of the map speaks to customers, and all the information to the right speaks to companies. In addition, the smaller map allowed us to raise the member list (and now stream) “above the fold” so that people no longer have to scroll down to start seeing information about our members.

Lastly, our system updates everything on the hour. If you don’t see a comment, blog post, or tweet the moment you add them, check back again at a couple minutes after the hour.